The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  When I was six I ate a lump of resin that had rolled beneath the coffee table. Dad was very careful to keep his stock out of reach, but this runaway piece, like a chocolate in its shiny pink wrapper, managed to evade him. Knowing I probably wouldn’t die, but that in all likelihood I’d be taken into care if he took me to the hospital, Dad chose instead to sit with me while I underwent hours of intense hallucinations, heightened, no doubt, by the plasticity of my unformed mind. Eventually I returned to earth, dazed but incredibly hungry, and in the aftermath, I’m told, consumed half a packet of Cocoa Pops, two bananas and most of a jar of pickles.

  I have little recall of what I said or did during those drugged hours, only the one memory of Dad’s big hand holding mine, and the little blue swallow tattoo between his first finger and thumb detaching and flying free. But in the following years I experienced what I believed were flashbacks to my childhood trauma. Visions would tumble into my mind in the last, liminal stages of sleep, visions that were as vivid and as strange as dreams, but marked apart from dream by a sure sense of remembering. In the first act, when the curtain rose, there would appear before my eyes a crazed batik, feathered streams of purples and reds and indigos and greens. Then teethed feelers and furred spikes rose, and trilobite curls, baroquely alien, self-propelling. A storm of parts raged then: compound eyes and rough mouth-hollows, a close pulse of primitive wings, and then the clawed and frantic movements of countless limbs, spurred and sharp like fractured arrows. And at the demented climax of all this, at the finale, I would step abruptly into a place where the light was speckled, brown, streaked. An oatmeal sky hung low over land that glowed in a light of amber-toned antiquity, a land which flowed and circled and sighed and lifted itself with the undulant sway of a billion faded blades of grass.

  Dad had told me that “sepia grass” were the only words I said, again and again, throughout my pre-pubescent trip. I must have heard that word, sepia, somewhere, so that it surfaced as I tried to tell him something of the washy hues that colored my hallucinations. But I have no original to compare, and I don’t know if my later half-waking visions truly mirrored what I thought I saw back then. I wonder if my six-year-old self could have so easily recovered from the same moments that, for me, always heralded awakening. That terrible shuddering of the air. The sudden shunt of pressure, immense and inescapable. The thing unseen, unheard, but felt.

  The strange thing is, I felt only a calm acceptance during these hypnagogic states—an acceptance of what was and what was about to be—and it didn’t occur to me to talk about them, about their striking imagery and atmosphere, no more than it would occur to anyone else to talk about the untranslatable chaos that plays out in their heads. And anyway, I was prone to strange and unreadable moods which troubled those around me, and it would have been reckless to feed the growing doubts about my mental health.

  My dad was always solicitous of my welfare, barring the occasional mishap beyond his control. Perhaps he saw a certain mental instability in my bouts of uncommunicativeness, and maybe he even blamed the childhood accident for that, but whatever the motives, he always tried his best to shield me from the more worrying realities of our lives. I had a fair idea who Dad sold to—no one had that many friends visiting at night—but he took great pains to conceal the workings of his illegal business, and I didn’t know where he obtained his supplies nor where he stored them, nor how much money he brought in. But, despite the suspected fragility of my psyche, my tendency towards a kind of internal freezing, he wasn’t hypocritical enough to stop me trying his wares when I became of age. Dad believed in the curative power of marijuana, a gift from the earth, and I can’t say it ever (except once) gave me a bad experience, although, unlike him, I could take it or leave it. It used to give me a hazy feeling, which I liked but didn’t crave.

  Above all, Dad conducted his affairs with complete discretion, and so when one day, out of the blue, he seemed about to give away some vital information, I immediately suspected the worst.

  “You’ll never believe it,” he said as he made a roll-up cigarette to round off his breakfast. “About my latest score.”

  I looked up from the book I was reading—I was in the middle of exams and the last ever term of school, a good student headed for a good university. His latest score? What was going on? Was he in trouble? Were our lives about to fall apart?

  “Don’t look so worried, Dan. It’s its name, that’s all. This new stuff I’m getting. Sepia grass, it’s called. You know—like you kept saying when you were little and ate that hash. Remember that, how I’ve told you about it? Sepia grass, you kept saying.” He did a little mime of what I suppose was meant to be the six-year-old me, goggle-eyed and pawing at the air. I didn’t laugh.

  “Tripping off your little head, you were, but I knew you’d come through OK. That stuff was pure. Mother marijuana doesn’t hurt her friends, so long as you don’t hurt her—haven’t I always told you that? I always wondered, you know, where you’d picked up the word sepia. TV? At school? What do you think?”

  I shrugged.

  “Kids pick on up things, and you’ve always been a bright kid, but I mean, it isn’t a six-year-old’s word, is it? Weird coincidence though. Bloody weird.”

  It was more than weird, what Dad had just told me. I had predicted the future. Might it be that, after all, like him, I received messages from the universe?

  “That’s mad,” I said. “What’s it like?”

  I should explain that Dad hadn’t smoked grass since it started to be genetically engineered for extra strength. He had someone else test it for him—a sort of imperial food-taster—and so his verdict would be second-hand.

  “Lenny says it’s stellar, completely old school astral. He’s arranging it all. Mind you, I’ve not heard from the sod since Wednesday, but you know what he’s like. Come to think of it though, I’m the one relying on him, so I’m the fool.”

  “So is he your grass tester nowadays?” I did know what Lenny was like. I’d known him all my life. A gentle soul, like Dad, but the most unreliable person that anyone could hope to meet. And Dad had trusted him with money?

  Dad blinked at me through the little square spectacles that magnified the eloquence of his eyes.

  “State secret, that is,” he said, and he lit his roll-up, stretched, and got up from the table.

  “Will I be able to try it, then?” I wasn’t hopeful, since I knew he wasn’t keen on me smoking “modern grass.”

  “Well—and only because you invented it and everything—I’ll keep some aside for after your last exam. Not before, no way. You know I don’t like you smoking this engineered stuff. Too many psychoses in kids too young to even understand the word. Let me guinea pig it first, see if there’s any freak-outs, then we’ll see.”

  “We’ll see.” Like you say to a child who’s nagging to go the zoo.

  Dad moved over to the sink to rinse his plate and at that moment, the glasses draining on the side vibrated gently, answering in their delicate way the deep juddering of a passing truck outside. Ours was an isolated house, a left-behind place at the edge of a stretch of dead manufacturing sites. Our neighbors were empty plots and shuttered buildings and we lived in hope of an offer from a keen-eyed housing developer, an offer we intended to grab with both hands. But this post-industrial road saw its fair share of traffic, serving as it did the recycling center which sat between our town and the next, and I was used to being powdered by the plumes of dirt these heavy vehicles churned up, or sprayed by their cold, muddy wakes. That morning, as I watched Dad tidying up the kitchen with his slow, almost loving, movements, it struck me, as it never had before, how inured we were to the deep bass growl of the passing trucks, so that we barely registered their presence. And wasn’t the effect of the sound, the impression it gave of a great bulk and force about to bear down upon the house, an analogue of something else I knew? Of that shuddering immensity, the unseen and unheard vastness of my almost-dreams? Had my mind simply woven pieces of my everyday realit
y into a more fantastic version of itself?

  The blinkers, you could say, were off. When I left for school, my thoughts flowed with clarity. Sepia grass was a commodity, a concrete fact, a coincidence, a name. The only message the universe was sending me was that I was blind to my own self-deception.

  At the bus stop, the chill breeze cutting through the peninsula brought water to my eyes. I straightened from my slouch and stepped forward. From the elevated position of the road I was looking down upon the marsh, upon the gullies, the small black trees, the banks of reeds. I knew every inch of the peninsula, that jutting elbow of land which cradled both the bleak remains of a freshwater marsh, and the sad, scattered, and fascinating graveyards of a lost industrial past. There was a sound in the wind that morning, a high whispering, and there was a vaguely copper haze above the thin low shrubs and trees, and it also hung, but paler, barely there, amongst the shifting reeds. Of course—that’s how my mind had made the field of sepia grass. It had its roots in this scene, in the shades of dormancy and desiccation that settled across the whole peninsula from the end of autumn until the early spring.

  I looked back towards the town, certain, and almost grateful, that those bland lanes and avenues, at least, had inspired no part of my recurrent hallucinations. In the eighteen years since I was born, a minor village had become this sprawling place. It had gained apartments, townhouses, terraces, avenues and lanes, all competing for a view of the river, so dark, so dazzling. And as I looked back at my nearly-new town, I noticed a car, the only one about on that exceptionally quiet morning, and I watched it as it travelled down one street towards the corner of another, and I thought it was an old Ford Cortina, the kind I’d seen in one of Dad’s old photographs of him and Mum. It had a wide, boxy snout and a snub rear end and its brown bodywork was spattered, and its windows were blind with the kind of grime you only see on long-abandoned rural wrecks. The car produced no sound, although with its jerky, stop-start movement, there should have been a choke, a backfire, a grind of failing gears. The muteness of its progress turned its presence strangely insubstantial, its being less, as it bumped around the corner and away.

  That afternoon my mind slipped again. I’ve mentioned my strange moods, and I’ll never know now if they were caused by my environment, by my reaction to it, or by some slow widening mental fissure that started long ago. An alien energy seemed to take charge at those times, dispensing with my unnecessary parts, those that lent my life its flavor, its personal dimensions. My surroundings buckled. My inside perished away. The sound of my name surprised me. My heartbeat lessened, and with it any sense of real existence. But I still functioned, remotely.

  On the way home, a girl from school approached and told me about a Saturday party on the marsh and that she hoped I’d come, and I remembered, as I mumbled noncommittally, that she was in fact my best friend, Jude. Her dark, unsmiling face studied mine: “See how you feel tomorrow,” she said.

  And at home, Dad saw the signs and knew what to do. He withdrew.

  I went to my room and sat at the window, eyes open to the evening’s coming gloom. Opposite, an old concrete way ran off, to end, I knew, in an asphalt plot strewn with burst mattresses and household junk. My gaze became fixed upon this pointless place, and in the way that your reflection does if watched too long, its features soon began to rearrange themselves. The broken glass in the tussocked verges, the lumps of rain-bleached plastic, the cloven hands of the trees, the vivid curl of spring’s first leaves; elements sprang forward, enlarged, while others retreated.

  Buddleias and elders grew around the track, meeting overhead in a natural arch, and the shadowed spaces that lay between them flickered beneath the fixity of my gaze, and then, as if they had conjured something from themselves, a moving thing appeared. My window was closed, but its single-glaze gave little insulation and so it was remarkable that, as before, I heard nothing. As though it had been newly calved, the filthy car pitched forward in a rush, stopping only in time, and with a violent lurch, when it met the road and then, as seemed inevitable, it bumped across to stop before our house.

  A moment passed before the driver’s door opened, and a hand, as thin-fingered as my own, appeared and grabbed the upper seal. The whole person followed, clad in an old beige mackintosh, floor length, too large for height and build, and the face concealed, when seen from above, by the brim of a cowboy hat. This clumsily disguised figure flapped over to our door, and then back to the car, head down, hunched, ridiculously furtive, and instantly, the vehicle was reversing, turning, and jolting off towards the town. How strange, I thought, with little interest, that such an incongruous thing, that very same car, should turn up here. And what does it mean, I thought, as I watched my father run out into the road? Why is he looking around like that? In my abstracted state, these frantic actions seemed completely inexplicable.

  My father went back inside, and I heard the door slam and a rustling, and then his footsteps on the stairs.

  “Sorry, matey.” His face appeared in the gap of my half-open bedroom door. “I know you need your peace and quiet. But did you just see someone?”

  “An old car.”

  “Right, right. Did you see who was in it?” He spoke breathlessly, as if it were something terribly urgent.

  “I couldn’t see them. They had a hat.”

  “A hat? Right. Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s just, well, they posted the stuff through the door. What kind of dickhead does that? Never mind, never mind. I’ll leave you to it.”

  I didn’t move from the window until it was fully night, when I sought the familiar refuge of my bed. When I awoke, hours later, I could make out the bulks of my desk and wardrobe in the dark, and outside, through the open curtains, a starless patch of sky. I had awoken from a perfectly ordinary exam anxiety dream; the ink didn’t flow, the paper kept disappearing, I had forgotten to wear clothes. I clicked my alarm clock. Three fifteen? Dad must have people in, because I could hear what sounded like voices. But why? He never had people round that late. I strained to listen, quietening my breath, and as if in answer to my efforts, the sounds became more precise. They had a rhythmic quality, a rise and fall. A hiss and click that swung near and then away. But was it voices I heard? There was a loud, startling crash; something heavy falling and smashing.

  “Dad?” I called out and swung myself out of bed. The floor was soft, shivering. In the golden brown light that now filled the room, I saw that my feet were deep in a quivering, living growth of grass.

  And then I awoke, for real, in dark silence.

  “I’m fine,” I told my father in the morning, but he looked at me as if I were possessed as I buzzed around the kitchen, wiping down, scrubbing the sink, sweeping.

  “I’ve just got lots of energy this morning,” I said.

  “You’re not on speed, are you?”

  “God, Dad, no. It’s just, how I was yesterday, I think…I think it won’t happen again. I think I’m better.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do.”

  I couldn’t tell him that I’d worked it out. It was those stupid flashbacks, those visions I’d invented myself, that had been messing with me all these years. Now it was over. I’d beaten it, seen through it, neutralized its power. And that dream last night—nothing. Nothing like the ones of the past. Just a field, no psychedelic storm, no baleful presence.

  I began to laugh, not madly, just a little, as I put the brooms and brushes away, and Dad came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “OK, but just calm down a bit for me, yeah?” And he gave me a nub of resin.

  “Great! I’ll take it to the party tonight,” I said. I didn’t even ask about the sepia grass. That whole thing was over.

  And it made me briefly popular, that bit of hash, when I got to the marsh that night. There were already twenty or so there, and they’d set fire to an old mattress which they’d piled with wood, and they were drinking cheap wine and cider and smoking some really bad stuff. The scarlet flames flared up, and we
dodged random bullets of red hot ash and wood. Jude was there and she had an old aerosol can which she threw into the flames and we all dashed back and whooped at the explosion. She came over to me, her eyes shining and strange, and handed me the last puffs of one of the joints I’d rolled.

  We all kept moving round the fire and the other kids’ faces slid in and out of the leaping light and shadows grew and ran away on the walls of the ruined building behind us. It was some kind of old warehouse made of corrugated iron, ferric blood seeping through the old paint. There were sealed and barred doors at its front and on its upper floor, and at the side, a smaller one, which a group of us had kicked through last summer. We’d pulled an old sofa in there and cleared a space.

  I took a swig from the bottle Jude handed to me and I coughed and I looked up at the red sparks flying from the fire and cracking into the night. Someone shoved me drunkenly, and I staggered forward, suddenly dizzy, feeling my weight move sideways too much. I flung out my hands to steady myself, but met in the grass something that ruffled and swelled beneath my touch. I swayed upright. Was it alive? What was it? A bird? It bustled towards me, humped, faceless, distorted, and I backed away, startled by a piece of plastic which seemed to have come alive for one moment, in that hectic light.

  I couldn’t see Jude. I pushed past some boys I’d known for years, but not well, and wondered who the older men were they were talking to —who’d invited them? —and I went around to the side of the old warehouse, holding onto the wall.

  There was a light at the far end of the long dark room, a yellow pool, and two people hunched together. In that cavernous place, so otherwise dark, there was no sense of where the walls or the ceiling started; the light was an island, a glowing desert camp. In the foreground, on the arm of the rescued sofa, a stump of candle guttered on a battered tin lid; a squalid sitting room stranded in outer space. Where was Jude?